Don’t ya just hate that guy?

I’m not really that artic­u­late in per­son.  I man­age to fool a lot of peo­ple because usu­ally when they are lis­ten­ing the most atten­tively, I’ve had a chance to write things down ahead of time.  I nor­mally only make sense when I’ve first sat down to edit and rearrange my oth­er­wise gar­bled thoughts.

I was worse as a teenager, more so in the pres­ence of pretty girls. When I wanted to be clever, I sounded weird.  What I wanted to be charm­ing, I was just awk­ward.  Then, as if I wasn’t doing a good enough job mak­ing myself look bad, when we would gather as a group of friends to watch movies, the guys on the screen, who were already sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter look­ing than me, deliv­ered lines that made them sound clever, charm­ing and sensitive.

Now, as an adult I find myself still stum­bling on sim­i­lar inse­cu­ri­ties.  It should come as no sur­prise to you that I am inter­ested in the­ol­ogy and spir­i­tual mat­ters, and I hope to some­how earn at least part of my liv­ing in this field.  So, to sati­ate my inter­est I read books, I lis­ten to radio pro­grams and I attend sem­i­nars, etc.  In part also do this to see what the com­pe­ti­tion is doing.  It can be dis­heart­en­ing to see just how com­posed, con­fi­dent and artic­u­late they are, at least com­pared to me.

As for those roman­tic movies, the older and more mature I get and the more real life I live, the less cred­i­ble they become.  Nat­u­rally they are intended to be mind­less fun and an escape from real­ity, but numer­ous stud­ies show that they do in fact impact our per­cep­tions of what can and should hap­pen with regards to love.  If our expec­ta­tions in this area are affected, even a lit­tle bit, it can seri­ously impact our hap­pi­ness.  For­tu­nately, since that time, most of those girls have real­ized that they didn’t in fact want one of those kinds of guys and have set­tled for real guys.  Unfor­tu­nately, it was right around that time I had actu­ally made some strides towards becom­ing one of those types of guys.

When I see reli­gious pro­fes­sion­als doing well at their jobs, that should push me to become bet­ter myself or to get out of the busi­ness alto­gether.  But there are a few reas­sur­ing points I’ve learned.  When I lis­ten to a radio inter­view, it always sounds like the host is com­ing up with tough ques­tions off the top of her head as the con­ver­sa­tion goes on, and the expert guest is imme­di­ately giv­ing well thought out answers off the top of his head as well.  What isn’t obvi­ous though is that the host, with care­ful study and prepa­ra­tion, writes out those ques­tions weeks in advance and gives them to the guest ahead of time so that he has time to com­pile answers that he is sat­is­fied with.  Then, the two of them act as though their dis­cus­sion is a smooth and free-flowing con­ver­sa­tion, when in fact it is just as scripted as the romance movies I once watched so uncom­fort­ably.  It’s a win-win arrange­ment for them, since they both come out sound­ing artic­u­late and intel­li­gent, and the radio pro­gram is more inter­est­ing as a result.  If they are suc­cess­ful, I will run out to buy the author’s book, and I will con­tinue to lis­ten to the radio program.

Besides my pro­fes­sional inse­cu­ri­ties, lots of peo­ple (lay­folk and clergy alike) strug­gle in a sim­i­lar way with their own spir­i­tual con­vic­tions.  But in the same way that a boy­ish Leonardo di Caprio can alter one’s idea of true romance, a phe­nom­e­non that I call ‘sound bite spir­i­tu­al­ity’ can alter how we feel about our own reli­gious self-understanding.  Peo­ple are drawn to experts and pub­lic fig­ures with short, catchy and sim­ple answers to life’s pro­found spir­i­tual ques­tions.  But these ques­tions are ones that the human race have been strug­gling with since the begin­ning of time.  It’s wrong for the church to claim sole own­er­ship of the answers to these ques­tions but an overly sim­ple answer also insults any­one strug­gling with that ques­tion now, and any­one who’s strug­gled with them in cen­turies past.  What is it about our age that we are sud­denly able to solve these mys­ter­ies?  What was wrong with those who went before us, and why couldn’t they see the answer as clearly as we now do thanks to the old man with the British accent on the stereo?

The Chris­t­ian faith is a jour­ney.  Along that jour­ney it is nat­ural to face both hills and val­leys.  The hard­ships that we face don’t mean that we don’t belong on the jour­ney or that oth­ers are jour­ney­ing bet­ter than us.  We are allowed to strug­gle on our Jesus jour­ney.  Imme­di­ately sim­ple sound­ing solu­tions to our strug­gles should not be met with our shame or frus­tra­tion at not hav­ing been able to see the answer sooner, but rather with sus­pi­cion at why this per­son is speak­ing with such con­fi­dence when so many for so long have struggled.